README.md

Tutorial: Setup a feature branch build job

This tutorial covers the setup procedure for a multi branch job which builds the feature branches.

💡 Feature branches are not deployed to nexus per default.

❗ Setup your project for develop and master first, as described in the project setup tutorial

Table of contents

• Background
• Step 1: Add the Jenkinsfile to all of your feature branches
• Step 2: Setup the Jenkins job.
• Step 3: Check the scan log

Background

This tutorial assumes that we are talking about a customer named 'client' and a project named 'project' with a repository location at https://git.company.tld/client/project.git and your feature branches are following the naming convention feature/<TICKET>.

Step 1: Add the Jenkinsfile to all of your feature branches

If the feature branches were not created after the project Jenkinsfile was added to the repository you have to cherry-pick this Jenkinsfile into every featurebranch of the project you want to build.

💡 The multi branch pipeline will only build branches matching the selector which contain a Jenkinsfile.

Example:

git checkout feature/<TICKET>
git cherry-pick <commit-hash-of-jenkins-file>
git push

Step 2: Setup the Jenkins job.

• Go to the jenkins inside your client/project folder an add a new Job.
  • Following the naming convention the name should be client_project_commit-features
    • Choose Pipeline as job type and click ok
      
• Scroll to Branch Sources and add at Git source
• Define the SCM
  • Repository URL: <Your repository url>
  • Credentials: <The credentials to use>
  • Add behaviors
    • Discover branches
    • Filer by name (with wildcards) and define your includes
    • Check out to matching local branch
• Scroll to Scan Multibranch Pipeline Triggers and select Periodically if not otherwise run with an Interval of 1 hour (or the value you need in your project)
• Your job config may now look similar to this screenshot
  
• Click Save

Step 3: Check the scan log

After save the scanning of the SCM starts. You can access the log by going into the multi branch pipeline job (which represents a kind of a folder)

You will se a output like this:

[...]
Seen branch in repository origin/develop
Seen branch in repository origin/feature/PROJECT-1
Seen branch in repository origin/feature/PROJECT-2
Seen branch in repository origin/master
Seen 4 remote branches
Checking branch feature/PROJECT-1
      ‘Jenkinsfile’ found
Met criteria
Checking branch feature/PROJECT-2
      ‘Jenkinsfile’ found
Met criteria
Checking branch master
Checking branch develop
Done.
[Thu Jun 22 13:24:20 CEST 2017] Finished branch indexing. Indexing took 1 sec
Finished: SUCCESS
[...]

And for each branch where the criteria matched a job should be created and the job should be queued for build.

💡 If the detection of branches is not working or the builds are failing have a look into the logs for finding the cause. If you are unable to solve the problem by yourself ask one of the friendly DevOps engineers for assistance.